Local fishermen risked their lives, playing a modest role in a mammoth conflict

In October 1942, two of the Navy’s smallest vessels embarked on a big mission.

“You’re going to Guadalcanal,” one of the skippers was ordered. “This cargo has got to go through.”

The two vessels, the 110-foot Paramount and the 128-foot Picaroto, sailed northeast from the New Hebrides and into The Slot, one of the South Pacific’s most dangerous passages. Evading Japanese patrols, the two vessels reached Guadalcanal’s Red Beach in November. They were greeted by a band of Marines who, though exhausted by combat and malaria, unloaded both boats in record time.

“We won’t take a chance on you boys getting sunk,” one Marine assured the Paramount’s captain, Ed Madruga. “This cargo is really important.”

The Paramount and the Picaroto were among the 53 original Yard Patrol boats, tuna clippers — most from San Diego — converted into military vessels during World War II. Known as YPs or Yippies, these vessels have been almost forgotten. That’s not surprising. They played a modest role in a mammoth conflict, hunting submarines and ferrying men, food, fuel and other supplies to American outposts.

U-T San Diego reporters Peter Rowe and John Wilkens explore how WWII shaped the “Greatest Generation” and our home. These stories will focus on local men and women who helped preserve our nation and re-create our city. The series is supported by U-T’s video partner, the Media Arts Center San Diego.

These unglamorous yet vital missions — just ask the men on Red Beach — were fulfilled at great risk. Twenty-one of the vessels and dozens of fishermen would never come home. When the survivors did sail back into San Diego Bay, though, their wartime experience would transform the tuna fleet and usher in this industry’s golden era. Using new technology and an intimate knowledge of previously unknown waters, they would chase tuna around the globe, hauling in record-setting catches.

“The war gave us a greater appreciation of what had to be done,” said August Felando, 83, former general manager of the American Tunaboat Association and an author who has written about the Yippies. “It wasn’t a local fishery any more. People came home from the war with this vision, and that expanded their horizons.”

Looking warlike

The San Diego History Center’s ongoing exhibit, Tuna!, includes a section on the Yippies. But the museum and other researchers have been unable to find any of these boats or crew members. “I don’t think there’s any of the tuna clippers that have survived,” said David Bruhn, a naval historian and Yippie authority from Northern California. “And I haven’t located any crew members who have survived.”

In the San Diego tuna fleet’s epic tale, though, this remains a central chapter.

While canned tuna was found in France since the 1870s, it was virtually unknown in the United States until the early 20th century. The California Fish Co., a San Pedro sardine cannery, began packing albacore around 1907. Four years later, the nation’s first cannery designed specifically for tuna — the aptly-named Pacific Tuna Canning Company — opened in San Diego.

Immigrants from Japan, Portugal and Italy flocked here, taking jobs on the boats and in the canneries. Local clippers concentrated first on albacore and bluefin, as these tuna migrated past California, then chased skipjack and yellowfin off Mexico. The vessels grew larger, the voyages longer, the canneries busier.

“Now we have some really nice boats being built,” Felando said, “just in time for the war.”

Shortly after Pearl Harbor, the Japanese — once central players in the tuna industry — were interned. Then the military, short of supply vessels, jealously eyed the dozens of clippers anchored in San Diego Bay. The Army took a few as tugs. The Navy’s need was greater, though, and chartered most of San Diego’s larger fishing boats.

But who would sail these clippers? “They’re complicated vessels,” Felando said, citing the intricate engines and refrigeration systems.

W.J. Morcott, a retired Navy commander who served as San Diego Port Director, asked for volunteers. Roughly 600 fishermen stepped forward and were immediately give Navy ranks and ratings.

After patrolling the waters off the Panama Canal, by spring 1942 most of the Yippies were in the war’s Pacific Theater. Painted battleship gray, armed with machine guns and depth charges, bearing their new Navy designations — Madruga’s Paramount, for instance, was re-christened YP-289 — the Yippies looked warlike. But only to civilians.

To Japanese warships, they looked like pushovers. To American crew members like Judd Zolezzi, who knew these boats were too weak to fight and too slow to flee, they looked doomed.

Zolezzi, who survived the war, died years ago. But a nephew still remembers his uncle’s sardonic assessment of his Yippie: “We were something for the Japanese to shoot at.”

Lost race, lost boat

Because the Yippies were helpless in combat, some believed they were useless in war. Rear Adm. Samuel Eliot Morison, a historian of the U.S. Navy in World War II, reported that Atlantic-based YPs were less than gallant when cornered by U-boats. Crew members, Morison maintained, agreed not to radio the German submarines’ coordinates in exchange for being allowed to safely abandon ship.

But Yippies in the Pacific, far from being accused of cowardice, won more than a dozen battle stars and several Presidential Unit Citations. In September 1942, the Prospect, YP-346, transported a band of Marine Raiders from Tulagi to Guadalcanal. Skipper Joaquin Theodore accomplished this mission safely, then headed back to Tulagi.

Theodore was warned that a Japanese cruiser and two destroyers were cruising The Slot, the narrow channel he had to cross.

“This was not our first race against enemy ships in the channel,” Vincent Battaglia, a San Diego tuna fisherman who served aboard the Prospect, noted in a postwar manuscript cited by Felando and other students of the Yippies. “It’s the first race we lost.”

As Prospect neared Tulagi harbor, the Japanese cruiser lit the midnight sky with a flare — and then ripped into Prospect. Shells battered the wooden hull, fragmented the pilot house and punctured pipes. Shrapnel hit Theodore in the chest; an electrician was blown off the vessel. Fifty yards from shore, men began leaping into the water, but Ernie Lopez remained aboard and beached the craft.

“Here,” Battaglia recounted, “the Marines were able to remove the wounded.”

A month later, three Japanese destroyers cruising off Guadalcanal caught the Endeavor, YP-284, and the fleet tug Seminole. Both American vessels were sunk.

Nature, too, took a toll. Yippies were claimed by storms, accidents and never-to-be-explained incidents. The Yankee, YP-345, sent its final radio message on Halloween 1942: “We are sinking fast 80 miles West Laysan Island.” No trace was ever seen of vessel or crew.

In small ways, though, these little craft helped win the war. They delivered aviation fuel to the Marine fliers on Midway atoll before that pivotal June 1942 battle; plucked downed aviators from the Pacific; kept troops supplied throughout the Solomon Islands campaign. While their mission peaked in 1943, Bruhn reports Yippies served at Iwo Jima in February 1945.

“The Navy turned them into survey vessels,” the historian said. “They would show up after the Marines took a hostile beach and mark the safe channels.”

One small box

World War II transformed San Diego’s tuna fleet in profound ways.

In 1941, when the war began, San Diego was home port to 90 commercial fishing vessels — and only 63 of those were 90 feet or longer.

In 1951, there were 700 fishing vessels, including 210 tuna clippers.

National demand for tuna was rising, and would be met in part by Yippie veterans who were now familiar with fisheries halfway around the world. Not only did they venture into the far corners of the Pacific, San Diego-based clippers would eventually explore the waters of Africa. For tuna fishermen in the postwar era, there were no longer any geographical limits.

And the fleet was also armed with new tools, technology that fisherman had been introduced to by the Navy: radar, advanced depth-finding sounders, improved refrigeration systems.

As a teen, Felando heard the occasional tale about the Yippies. But he didn’t give this episode much thought until he was grown, fishing in the central western Pacific. There, the war and the tuna clippers’ naval exploits still resonated.

On a later trip to the East Coast, Felando visited the museum at the Washington Navy Yard.

“I’d like to see what you have on the YPs,” he told an employee.

After a search, an archivist retrieved a single small box of clippings.

“They have hardly anything,” Felando said.

Soon, though, the YPs may finally receive their due. Bruhn’s manuscript, “Yachts and Yippies,” is now in his editor’s hands.